Tomorrow, Wall Street enters into the time-honoured and often silly ritual of non-farm payrolls. Every fourth Friday, the noisy data creates a rumbustious end to the week.
The excitement is usually misplaced. This year, an oddly strong May report was cancelled out four weeks later by an oddly weak report for June. And unemployment tends to be a lagging indicator, recovering later than other economic factors.
But at this juncture, it commands attention. One reason lies in the mortgage market. US house prices appear to have hit the floor. Stable prices should feed through into accurate prices for the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities on banks' balance sheets that arguably sparked the crisis.
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